I
spent a lot of Eat Pray Love wondering, How does she afford to pay for all of this?
Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) gets divorced, loses at least half of her
worth in the settlement, then runs off for a year-long trip to Italy, India, and
Bali, where she spends money all willy-nilly on lodging, food, clothes, and
trinkets in a guru's gift shop. She
does all of this, from the movie's reasoning, off the income she's made from a
self-indulgent, off-Broadway show in a tiny theater that loses two audience
members (a good percentage, considering the size of the house) who think the
play is crap.

It's
a thought I had often because something about Liz's journey to self-discovery
feels off.

Then
I read that the real Elizabeth Gilbert, on whose memoir the movie is based, paid
for her three-stop trip using the money she received for an advance on the book
she was going to write about the trip. That's
when things start to fall into place.

Now
I'm not suggesting—nor would I ever suggest—that Gilbert did not go to these
places, do these things, and meet these people, but I am fairly sure that had
Gilbert gone on this trip, wrote the book, and then got paid for it, the story
would be a bit different. The
lessons of the movie adaptation of Eat
Pray Love are pat and generalized. They
are not the teachings one would find for oneself but things out of a self-help
book. They feel planned.

The
story is divided cleanly into three acts that conveniently correspond to the
three verbs of the title with a prologue. Liz
divorces the aimless Stephen (Billy Crudup), eats in Rome, prays in Kolkata, and
loves in Bali.

Roberts
never conveys a true sense of rock-bottom, and she is regularly shown up by
Richard Jenkins as Richard from Texas, who talks in "bumper sticker"
(He's not the only one) at a guru's in India, and Javier Bardem as Felipe, the
guy she meets/hates/loves in Bali. In
their shorter screen time, both manage to express a lost soul honestly looking
for healing.

The
narrative is messy, flashbacking to her marriage and a troubled affair with a
younger actor David (James Franco). Focusing
on guilt for the divorce makes sense, but the bits slowly revealing how terrible
her relationship with David became before she left doesn't. It's material for the prologue weighing down the journey.